Classifieds
Looking for housing in Berkeley is ridiculous. At first, I had planned to write a little column about it, but for the most part, the housing ads are ridiculous enough to speak for themselves.
Actual housing listing excerpts:
-About us: *We're 4 people (in our late 20's, grad students/ journalists/poets/healers)
-Share apartment with 38 year old vegetarian, gay, male artist, and Dotty the cat.
-Gay male has furnished room to sublet to other gay visitors
-We keep a vegetarian kitchen. Carnivores need not apply.
-we like to have people over for dinner, have tea parties, occasional small children staying the night, the occasional orgy. we like people who want to be a part of the family.
-We are 3 ladies, all 23, queer-ish, trans friendly, and nice: A quiet nerdy stripper who is rarely a presence in the home, and lives on bagels, coffee, and ice cream; A retail slave/fat activist who spends a lot of time making fabulous foods; A sex-worker/childcare professional who also does the domestic thing.
-in the past, we've really loved our androgynous plant-ninja, prison-activist gender-educator, and our trans art fag.
Just to let you know, i did NOT decide to room with any of the people that posted the above advertisements. although i inevitably (or unavoidably) have agreed to sublet a room in a house with - and i'm not making this up - vegetarian lesbians.
*sigh* if i prayed, i think i'd pray for myself right now.
Editorial
FRIDAY -- Two days before Laura leaves her San Diego home, the fact that she's leaving finally hits.
So i'm moving from San Diego in about two days. My room is stripped naked and totally vulnerable. In 24hours, the very desk i'm typing on won't belong to me anymore. I think i finally have to admit to myself that college is over. (dammit)
I'm mad at myself for having spent so little time at the beach, hardly learning to surf, not committing myself to an instrument this year when i had the chance. Not a surprise.
More specifically, i have noticed an awkward feeling of loneliness. Especially after peetie left. I mean, i've felt lonely before, maybe even felt lonely a good fraction of my time, but it's different. I notice it most when i'm talking to a new person, like I'll be disappointed that someone who appears cool at first then after turns not to be. Or vice versa, when an interesting person doesn't really seem to want to talk to me.
Rina would have said "Four hugs a day, that's the minimum." I wonder if hug-debt accumulates interest. I hope not. Is there hug bankrupcy?
Honestly, i'm scared that friends here are now out of my life. I don't want that. When i came to SD, it took
three years to find really great life-long friends. I doubt i even realize how much i'm going to miss Maddy and Clay and Andrew or how lucky i was to find any great friends at all. It was an awesome senior year. I hope i don't lose them, or any of my other awesome friends.
What's worse is knowing myself, depression will catch up with me pretty fast if i don't find fun people in Berkeley. That could lead me into some unhealthy situation/relationship or who knows what else. Anticipating it is the worst part. I'm scared.
Despite all this, I know i'll be really proud of myself once i've settle into my new place.
For the time being, i plan to keep my stuffed animals close by.
Come visit. i'll be looking for a friend.
Cyberland in Maryland
UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND - AIM triumphs over traditional education.
check out this college application for the University of Maryland:
https://was-1.umd.edu/contact/registration/register. For those of you who are too lazy to move your mouse over to the link and click on it, it's an application with little fields that you fill in your informration. The first four fields in order of appearance are as follows: (1) Screen name, (2) email address, (3) First Name, and (4) a little check box markled (i am not making this up) "Check here if you do not have a first name."
Huh?
Answer this question for me - How many people do you know that don't have a first name by the time they
graduate high school? Gee, I guess even the un-named high school students of the new millenium have screen names. Who needs a real name when you can have a cyber name!
Alright, alright. I don't know why the university decided to organize their applications that way, but I guess I can kinda understand putting email and screen name at the top of the form. I mean, having an internet savvy student body could greatly benefit the college experience as a whole. For example, without internet the students would lose the ablility to write papers as thoroughly researched and well written as students do today, using the method of pretending to do work but reading AIM profiles instead. It is important not to underestimate the work-avoidance powers of AIM. According to a study conducted at the Uninveresity of California San Diego, in which I asked my friends to guess what % of the time they spend avoiding work using AIM and then fudged the numbers in order to exaggerate as much as possible, it was concluded that the average college student spends as much as 12-99.9% of their school time reading AIM profiles. If that's not evident enough, I once made a trip to the library to check up on a friend that was (supposedly) taking notes from a book before beginning an essay. In order to complete this task, he had actually felt the need to
hand draw an AIM buddy list in his notebook. (mind you, that also ALL he had in his notebook after - get this -
5 entire hours.) I think AIM is taking over higher education. But hey, at least we'll have quick typing skills!
Anyway, sorry about the sarcasm... I'll try to be less caustic in the next column. For now, I gotta check up on my profile before the UofM application reviewers do. TTYL ppl!
Finding The One
California – Couples find love in the Golden State
Ok, i’m going to a wedding this weekend, which happens to be the second wedding that i’ve been to in the past few months. It is a wonderful and beautiful thing to see my friends find love and devotion, except for the fact that having married friends makes me feel old. Mind you, not only are both of my marrying friends disappearing to a faraway land to live with the new Love of Their Life, but both of them ARE YOUNGER THAN I AM. And as if that’s not bad enough, Mormon “weddings” aren’t even real weddings for several reasons. First of all, i’m not mormon so i can’t attend the actual ceremony. Secondly, mormon weddings don’t have an all-you-can-consume-alcohol-products counter.
So i might as well embrace this old thing. I'll just start making some casserole dinners right now. Any leftover casserole will be no problem at all, after i host my first tupperware party. I can even dye my hair grey, just to get it over with faster.
Ok seriously, i’m gonna keep the black hair. But having married friends DOES make me feel old, although feeling old isn’t even the bad part. The real downer is the fact that i feel like i’m falling behind. Here i am, 22 years of age, with friends that are already married, and totally unable to locate any decent male counterpart to share my life with. I mean, how are all my girl friends producing these Love-Of-Your-Life-quality men, when the guys i know are so busy cracking really loud jokes about (this really happened) mexican cunnilingus in a sit-down family restaurant that in order to optimize their dining experience, the fruit flies at our patio dining table asked to be moved to a different table on the inside of the dumpster. I was so embarrassed. I went over to the dumpster to apologize.
I’m not giving up though. Maybe if i have an optimistic mindset and keep my eyes open, i can meet some nice guy at the tupperware fiesta this weekend. For now, i’m probably in the liquor store, picking out a nice flask to take to this so-called “wedding.”
The Sunday** Funnies
I didn't write these. but i did laugh at them.
Your Mom is like carbon, she'll bond with almost anything!
Your Mom is so dumb that she can't even solve a second-order non-homogeneous differential equation!
Your Mom is like a protractor.....good at every angle.
Your Mom prefers 77 to 69 because she gets 8 more
Your Mom is so stupid she thought that e^pi*I was equal to -2.
Your Mom is so dumb, she thinks cosine is something you do on a loan.
Your Mom is so dumb she tried to use the Pythagorean theorem to solve an obtuse triangle.
Your Mom is so fat that when she jumps astronomers have to recalculate Hubble's constant
Your Mom thinks square roots are vegetables.
Your Mom's muscle to fat ratio can only be explained in irrational complex numbers.
The shortest distance between your mom and any given person is 50 cents.
Your Mom's mass is so huge, that considering 2Mm/r^2 is not even worth considering.
The integral of your mom is fat plus a constant, where the constant is equal to more fat.
Your Mom is so fat, objects fall towards her at a rate of 9.8m/s^2
Your mom is a convenient proof that the universe is still expanding exponentially
**actually, it's tuesday.
Editorial
It's kinda long, so if you don't like analyzing, just read the first part.
Alright, so within on week of creating it, several different people have taken valuable time to inform me that my blog may be a bit "ugly", "awkward," or from one person who attempted to be more polite, "it's kinda green." Peetie on the other hand, was a little less subtle when she told me (not
asked me but
told me) that next time i am in town, we are going to sit down and spend some quality blog-make-over time. haha i love peetie.
Oh and Clay, what's 'sardonic' mean anyway?
alright... i feel like i'm getting hints that it's time to write something a little more personal in here so here it goes.
i'm spending my last little bit of time in san diego right now before i move up to berkeley to begin my future-war-over-oil prevention plan of helping to design a fusion reactor. it is kinda exciting since i may finally get to do something useful with my life, plus it's about time i move on from bumming with the roommies and grow up some. but it's sad too.
i realized how sad leaving is when i went to spend some time w/ ol' john nichols the other day. for those of you who don't know john, he's the guy who works at the zoo, baked bread in his dorm room, and slept on his hallway floor for 7 years. or for the meyers-briggs fans, he's an ISFJ - hard to get to know as you'd expect from an IJ, but if you make it past that, as perceptive and benevolent as you'd hope from an SF. personally, john's a guy who's managed to find himself a special little niche in my life; although i rarely get to see john, i know he really cares about me even if he doesn't always show it. he sorta intrigues me, maybe because ISTJ is my exact opposite, but who knows... girls who meet john habitually develop little crushes on him so maybe he's just intriguing. the girls never have any luck though, cuz if you want to be friends with john, chances are that you're going to have to call him up yourself.
so this past weekend, that's just what i did. i reached john's roommate sarah, which is always good because sarah's so damn cool (imagine as non-girly as janie, but with LOTS of presence - she's an ENTJ) and we all went out. we bummed around balboa park. and looked at weird plants. then we ate mexican food. and somehow, it was the most simple, nice fun i'd had in a long time.
so the sad feeling that i've successfully tangent-ed away from by babbling about people's personality types(sorry about that), came as i was leaving that night. i mean, i see these friends so seldom as it is. it suddenly felt like i'd never see them again. i wondered why i spend so much of my damn time with random people and so little with people i care about. i hadn't even seen john since berekely plans were finalized, so i made a point to tell him that i'm leaving. now, you know how i said that john cares about people even when he doesn't show it? well, he didn't not show it this time. i tried to tell him all about fusion, but he just kept saying that the last time he heard, i was staying here, that i wasn't planning on leaving, and that i hadn't told him...
so there you go. i was really sad. that's my personal, emotional and largely sarcasm-free experience to share with you. so if you're in sd and you're reading this, give me a call sometime! or better yet, come visit me in berkeley. i don't know anyone in that city, and am rather certain that i'll be needing a friend sometime soon.
Fan Club Takes Action
Cyberworld -- Comments left for the first time in burgundyjade blog history
Recent UCSD graduates make history as the first recorded burgundyjade comment in Cyberworld.
geez i'm such a nerd, i think comments made my day. Especially from a couple of extremely musical guys who always manage to make me feel untalented by doing thing such as: being way more talented than me.
Plus, i have learned a valuable lesson that i would like to share: Virtual Compliments are way easier to accept gracefully than Real Compliments.
Complimentor: "You are very smart."
Graceful Complimentee: "Why thank you, Complimentor. Notice that i am not only intelligent, but a graceful complimentee as well."
Complimentor: "You are so nice."
Laura: "Wow, no way, i had a teddy bear that thought that same thing once. He was one of those bears with the beans in his butt, but his head's kinda unravelling now."
VitruaComplimentor: Nice entry.
Laura: "Hell yeah it is! YEEHAW!" [dances hokey pokey around room in mismatched socks and Jockey underwear]
So for Everybody (wink) out there who is compliment-impaired as i am, VirtualComments are a great compliment evasion tactic. Why learn to be graceful when you can just avoid nice people!? Especially if you have your very own room and a good ol' pair of comfy cotton undies.
Local Girl Defeated
SAN DIEGO -- Long term disputes over overwhelming internet forces come to a sudden halt.
After years of treacherous battles of Real Life and fearless refusal to succumb to the evil powers of Cyberland, UCSD graduate and head of the Cyber-Rebellion, Phil E. Cheese, finally gives in to a life with online diary keeping. War analysis experts and Cyberworld ambassadors applaud the decision, althouh critics still remain.
OK actually, it wasn't really THAT bad of a battle. Or that long, come to think of if. I mean, I had never actually
seen a blog or really known what one was until, say, about a week ago. And it's not like the week was really that much of a
battle, perse, although there
was certainly an overwhelming and powerful force of Summertime Laziness preventing the blog from being started...
Oh well. Janie and Peetie both got one, so i got one too. That way, I hold on to my ultimate do-what-other-people-do coolness.
*Picture of Laura Wearing Sunglasses Here*
caption: Laura sports a pair of sunglasses, the icon of Cool.
haha... i don't actually know how to post a photo. i tried though. i totally got a picture of myself and drew some really big sunglasses on my face as a totally dorky image of my coolness. at least, i WAS doing this until Ted called me and interrupted me from filling in the color for the lenses. (how totally UN-cool) unfortunately, my coolness was not enough to cover things like, you know, maybe being able to use the picture or something.
anyway, it is a wonderful do-nothing-summer, and i have done a lot of really exciting, eventful and educational non-nothing activities that i am dying to share with you, my readers. of course, this is lie. this blog says nothing about what i've been up to, since the most exciting thing i have done so far today consists of... well... starting a blog.
and also, i don't actually have any readers.
so yeah, leave me a comment! not the first one though, i think ryan has reserved that one. be quick though, Ryan, because my huge fan club is desperately waiting to respond to my oh-so-commentable blog and for your own safety, had better not keep them both waiting.
